1. Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure relates to the field of business-to-business commerce and, more particularly, to the automated exchange of business documents between trading partner entities.
2. Description of the Related Art
Enterprises that engage in business-to-business (B2B) transactions employ systems to generate, exchange, and interpret electronic business documents such as electronic purchase orders, invoices, and other documents. Entities that exchange electronic business are referred to herein as trading partners. Trading partners may employ different enterprise applications and/or database applications internally. Even trading partners that use the same application platforms internally may use different formats for the same types of electronic documents. To enable automated B2B transactions, each trading partner typically develops at least one translation map to translate an outgoing document from the applicable internal format to an external format, which is agreed upon by the trading partners, and at least one translation map to translate an incoming document from the external format to the applicable internal format. Large enterprises having numerous trading partners often have a significant investment in the development of translation maps for their trading community.